The Olympic Games always begin with concerns. Some years the concerns are about human rights. Or about safety and security. Or environmental issues. Or preparedness. Or corruption. Or about the incredible cost of the event.

The Sochi Olympics begin - for the first time in Olympic history - with the complete set: major concerns about all of the above. And with a new issue to add to the list: the revolting killing of stray dogs.

These are Vladimir Putin's Olympics, a one-man show, the first Olympics to be so singularly associated with a country's leader since the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Putin has spent a reported $51 billion for his vanity project. That's more than China's absurd output - an estimated $40 billion - for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The cost is more than every other Winter Olympics in history combined.

For $51 billion, you would think the hotels would be finished, the toilets would function and friendly mutts on the street would find homes rather than get poisoned in what the Russian government chillingly has called "pest control."

Apparently not.

These are the first Olympic Games - winter or summer - that I will have missed since the 1994 Olympics, which were held inside the charming snow globe of Lillehammer, Norway. That was a far simpler time, before the Atlanta bombing in 1996, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, before security expenses mushroomed and the cost of hosting the Games became obscene.

I've been at Olympics where terrorism was a concern: My colleagues and I had to take "terrorism training" before the 2004 Athens Games, held in the early stages of the Iraq War. We were advised to pretend we were Canadian. I've been in unfinished Olympic housing: They never tiled the bathroom of my cell in Turin, and after two weeks I could poke my finger through the sodden sheetrock. I've been at Olympics where human rights were a huge issue: In Beijing, protesters were jailed or hidden and our Internet access was restricted.

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An odd location

But Sochi is the most modern of Olympics, with all of the modern problems rising up at once, at a fully manufactured venue. The summer resort on the Black Sea is the only place in Russia where it doesn't snow. The location happens to be in one of the most volatile regions in the world, just hours from Chechnya and Dagestan and closer to Syria than to Moscow.

The terrorist threats have been coming nonstop since the Games were announced. Doku Umarov - a Chechen separatist who may or may not be dead - called for the use of "maximum force" in attacks on the Games, describing them as "satanic dances on the bones of our ancestors." This week, a threat from bombs concealed in toothpaste tubes was reported. Security is supposed to be airtight, except in the case of reporters who managed to drive their unauthorized car within a few hundred feet of the media center inside the secure compound a few days ago.

The issue of human rights is extremely troubling. Putin's government has ruthlessly cracked down on dissent, jailing protesters. Computers and phones of visitors have been hacked. The restriction of gay rights has gained global attention, due to draconian "anti-homosexual-propaganda" laws passed last year, and reports of ongoing harassment of gay citizens and visitors. The Sochi mayor announced that his area was a gay-free zone, saying "we do not have them in our city." Top Western officials, including President Obama, will not attend the Games. Obama sent a pointed message along with his delegation, which includes three gay athletes (though Billie Jean King won't be making the trip due to her mother's illness).

Human rights, safety

All eyes will be trained on Sochi for the coming two weeks, praying that everyone stays safe. Many are hoping that one or many brave athletes stand up for the rights of others.

As usual, the Olympic issues are swathed and obfuscated by opaque language and misdirection. The killing of dogs is "pest control." The squashing of human rights is considered a measure to control "propaganda." Insane cost overruns are "budgetary" rather than concessions to the Russian mafia. Environmental concerns are dismissed - "progress."

And some have suggested that the unfinished hotel rooms, nonfunctional bathrooms and even disappearing puppies are useful distractions from the real, more alarming concerns of human rights and human safety.

Once the Games get fully under way, the competition will provide the ultimate distraction. For what's usually 16 days - oddly 18 this year - the Olympics project an ideal of how the world could be. Young, talented people from all over the globe come together to compete, to interact, to share cultures.

Even if you don't care about luge or curling or halfpipe the other 1,444 days between Olympic cycles, you will likely care about it for a moment this February. You will cheer on your country, relishing the spectacle.

But when it's all over, what will be the memory of Sochi? Will we remember some glorious athletic feat? Or something darker? The world will watch Russia for the next two weeks, waiting and witnessing Putin's legacy.